Saturday, October 13, 2012

Type 2 diabetes has a significant
negative impact on health but that impact can be improved with as simple an
intervention as regular brisk walking or other physical activity that most
people with diabetes can do.

One
of life's certainties is that everyone ages.

However, it's also certain that
not everyone ages at the same rate.

According
to recent research, the cardiovascular system of people with type 2 diabetes
shows signs of aging significantly earlier than those without the disease.
However, exercise can help to slow down this premature aging, bringing the
aging of type 2 diabetes patients' cardiovascular systems closer to that of
people without the disease, says researcher Amy Huebschmann of the University
of Colorado School of Medicine.

Fitness Decreases with Age, Worse in Diabetics

The
review of current research by Huebschmann together withWendy Kohrt and Judith
Regensteiner from the same instituition suggests that it's inevitable that
fitness gradually decreases with age, such that a healthy adult loses about 10
percent of fitness with each decade of life after age 40 or 50. However,
fitness levels are about 20 percent worse in people with type 2 diabetes than
in nondiabetic adults. These findings have been shown in the adolescent,
middle-aged adult, and older adult populations. Diabetes appears to place a 20
percent tax on your fitness levels at each stage of life. Not only do these
patients have more trouble with exercise, the researchers say, but also with
activities of daily living, such as a simple stroll to the corner store. This
loss of fitness increases the mortality of people with type 2 diabetes, says
Huebschmann, as well as the risk of early disability.

Exercise Decrease Premature Aging

The
good news is that exercise training can decrease these premature aging effects,
a result that Huebschmann and her colleagues, as well as other researchers,
have shown in various studies. Findings suggest that after 12 to 20 weeks of
regular exercise, fitness in type 2 diabetic people can improve by as much as
40 percent, although fitness levels did not fully normalize to levels of
nondiabetic people.

"In
other words, these defects are not necessarily permanent," Huebschmann
says. "They can be improved, which is great news."

Helping Diabetic People Exercise

Huebschmann,
whose research involves finding and overcoming barriers of physical activity
for people with type 2 diabetes, notes that each piece of research she and her
colleagues present gives hope that exercise training can help lower the risks
of cardiovascular problems associated with this disease. However, she adds,
these findings can't make people with type 2 diabetes incorporate the
recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise into their lives.

"People
with diabetes are typically less physically active, but the majority of those
patients say that their doctors told them to be active," Huebschmann says.
"There's a disconnect between what patients know they should do and what
they actually do."

She
and her colleagues are currently working on developing interventions that get
people with type 2 diabetes to reach their exercise goals, such as receiving
text messages or automated reminders.

###

The
above story is based on the October, 10, 2012 news release by American
Physiological Society.

An
abstract of the study entitled, "Exercise Attenuates the Premature
Cardiovascular Aging Effects of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus," will be presented
by Amy Huebschmann and her colleagues at The Integrative Biology of Exercise VI
meeting being held October 10-13 at the Westin Westminster Hotel in
Westminster, CO. The full program is online HERE .

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